The Long Read: Crawley Town - what if we don't all make it?

Crawley Town have been under crypto-brownership since April 2022, but the revolution hasn't taken the club to the moon yet.

How seriously should we take pre-season friendly results? There is an obvious reflex reaction to seeing results concerning your team, especially when you haven’t seen any for a few weeks, and it’s easy to get carried away by either extremity of what you see, from nihilistic fatalism all the way through to “all aboard HMS Piss This Tinpot League”. 

At this time of year, it’s healthy to maintain a degree of scepticism. In July, some of the players in these matches won’t even be with the club by the start of the league season. Many more will be unlikely to make it through the whole of the coming ten months with your club. There’s certainly a good chance that your manager won’t. Football clubs have always been somewhat transient in their very nature, and with long-term loans being the order of the day across the EFL these days, they’re arguably more transient than ever before. 

Supporters of League Two club Crawley Town could take what they chose from their last two friendly matches. On Tuesday 24th July, they took a strong team to Isthmian League Division One Division One North club Heybridge Swifts and won 7-1. But the previous weekend, in a behind closed doors friendly against Portsmouth, they’d been beaten 9-1. It’s probably best not to read too much into either result, really. 

Crawley finished the 2022/23 season in 22nd place in League Two. Things might easily have ended up much worse. Between the start of December and the middle of March, a run during which they took just five points from thirteen league games saw them drop from 19th in the table to the very bottom. But over the last few weeks of the season, they started to pull clear again while neither Rochdale nor Hartlepool could do enough to keep themselves up and Crawley ended up three points above the relegation places. 

And all of this played out against a backdrop of disorganisation and discord behind the scenes at the club. Kevin Betsy had been appointed as manager in June 2022. He lasted until October. Lewis Young took over as caretaker (he’d been managing the team the previous season), but he was replaced at the end of November by Matthew Etherington, who lasted three games and 34 days before leaving and being who replaced by Scott Lindsay, who oversaw the second half of last season and remains in charge now.

And it didn’t end there, either. 

Crawley Town were bought by the crypto consortium WAGMI United —”WAGMI” is an acronym for the popular (though arguably now less so) crypto phrase, “we’re all gonna make it”—in April 2022. And WAGMI arrived with all the bluster that we’d expected, with promises to take the club all the way to the Premier League through the sale of NFTs and by building an international fanbase. Crawley Town, it was loftily promised, would be “The Internet’s Team”.

For a while, a surface reading of events surrounding the club indicated that this crazy scheme might just even work. Dom Telford, League Two’s highest goalscorer the previous season, joined the club from Newport County. That first NFT drop included a package available including voting rights on club decisions, a special third kit and other digital content. You can see just how much of its value that NFT has lost over the last twelve months here.

It didn’t take long for the frontmen of the WAGMI adventure, Eben Smith and Preston Johnson, to start to lose the faith of supporters. A stunt in association with YouTube collective The Sidemen which ended in the claim that one of them might end up playing for the club in the FA Cup went down like a cup of cold sick. It later emerged that one of The Sidemen had been told that they could play in the game concerned but declined in the knowledge of how he would feel if the club he supports did the same. Johnson claimed that the publicity stunt was intended “supplant ourselves as unique and different and non-traditional”, but he was met with a furious response from supporters.

Things haven’t improved from there. When Etherington left the club, it was over the decision to sell popular striker Tom Nichols to Gillingham—who at the time were one of the few clubs below Crawley in League Two—for a rumoured £60,000 at the start of the January transfer window. Nichols made his debut for Gillingham on the 14th January, scoring one and creating the other in a 2-0 win against Hartlepool United for his new club. A couple of weeks earlier, Johnson had infuriated supporters by announcing that he would be sitting in the dugout for their matches against Stevenage and Newport.

Owners that had arrived with the overbearing brashness of speculators promising the earth retreated into their shells, and the lack of communication to come from within the club itself has also started to frustrate supporters. Still, perhaps the old adage that “it is better to keep your mouth silent and considered a fool than to open it and remove all doubt” applies in the case of the owners of this particular club. 

When a number of supporters recently joined a Twitter live space on a completely unrelated topic at which Johnson could be located, things went as well as might have been expected. When he was asked by one, “Where’s Preston, when are you selling?, the club executive replied to the host, “You are just going to get crazy Crawley fans at this point”, a comment which only seems likely to inflame fans who have become increasingly concerned at the condition of their club still further. An apology followed, albeit with caveats.

The frosty reception that Johnson is now getting when he lifts his head above the parapets is no great surprise, considering how the summer has gone for the club. The club’s “Fan’s Council”, announced in July 2022, already seems to have withered on the vine, with its Twitter account having not been used since December 2022. With two weeks to go until the start of the new season no season tickets have been sent out yet, while the club’s new kit for the 2023/24 season still hasn’t been confirmed.

There is no indication that the club has a shirt sponsor (the shirt sponsor for 2022/23 was an NFT, but there has been no indication of whether this has renewed or whether the club has been looking elsewhere), while the sponsorship deal on Broadfield Stadium itself expired July 2022 and hasn’t been renewed or taken up by anyone else, and the club has already confirmed that they will no longer producing a programme from the start of next season. None of these matters are catastrophic in and of themselves, but when these small issues start to build up and form a pattern, they start to reflect extremely badly on those who are expected to ensure that these matters are being dealt with. 

Season tickets aren’t really such a big deal. Supporters don’t really need to have them in their hands until the day of their first home fixture. But the failure to get a new kit for the new season does raise an eyebrow. We know a new one is coming, as the club shop is already sold out of adult shirts from last season after having reduced the price of them to £10. But with two weeks to go until the start of the new season, no new kit for it has been announced, which seems all the more peculiar when we consider the song and dance which accompanied the release of their NFT shirt.

This all raises a pretty fundamental question; who’s running the show and do they really know what they’re doing? Acting CEO & Director of Football Chris Galley resigned from his duties at the club at the end of April, and he hasn’t been replaced. He’d only joined the club the previous August. And even though last season ended with the club having just done enough to escape the relegation trapdoor, the loss of further experienced players such as Jack Powell, Jake Hessenthaler, Aramide Oteh and Kwesi Appiah (among others), small wonder that supporters are furrowing their brows over this apparent policy of replacing experience with younger players, especially considering how close the club came to losing its EFL status last time around.

But a recent meeting between those running the club and the Crawley Town Supporters Alliance yielded few of the concrete answers that supporters had been hoping to receive. The SA reported afterwards that: “The Co-Chairmen highlighted the recruitment strategy of uncovering young players from the lower leagues with high potential. They commented that the strategy has yielded some promising early results and credited Scott Lindsey for his role in identifying and developing such talent”.

They also added that: “We were informed that the search for a new CEO is ongoing. At our previous meeting, the CTSA had suggested a candidate whom the club has spent the past few weeks in conversations with. Unfortunately, negotiations were unsuccessful. The CTSA suggested another candidate on this call and the club is beginning the vetting process immediately.” So, in other words, nothing to see here or, to use argot that seems appropriate considering the identity of the club’s ownership, “trust me bro”.

It’s difficult to comment on the club’s financial position at present because their next set of accounts—to be made up to the 29th June 2022—aren’t due to be published at Companies House until the 21st September. The last available set of accounts are of limited use. They were to the year ending 30th June 2021, and showed the club with few fixed tangible assets—the stadium itself is owned by the local council—and a small float of cash at the bank of £295,000, more or less what you might expect for a club struggling at the wrong end of League Two. 

But Crawley’s financial picture will almost certainly have changed since then, and that brings us back to that NFT sale from last summer. It is said to have raised more than £4.1m, but that raises further questions of its own. How was that money used? It is to be hoped that the owners aren’t expecting this sort of financial windfall every summer. NFTs are valued by their scarcity; a repeat of that sort of fundraising effort seems highly unlikely.

So, if this windfall has been received over the last year or so, how was it allocated? Has it insulated Crawley Town from the issues that come about as a result of having one of the smallest average home crowds in the EFL (although in the interests of fairness it should also be added that crowds last season were substantially increased on the previous season, likely as a result of a substantial cut having been made to the cost of buying a season ticket)? According to Johnson, WAGMI United paid off a £2m debt when buying the club, but it’s impossible to have any idea of how the club has been run financially over the last 15 months.

It is to be hoped that the benefits of the NFT sale—and it is worth remembering that the amount of money it’s said to have raised is substantially more than anyone would expect the annual wage budget of a League Two club to be—haven’t been squandered. This NFT may have raised millions of pounds, but for whom, exactly?

Even the accounts to be published this year won’t tell that story. That will have to wait until September 2024, and the only indications of the club’s financial picture in the meantime will be that first set of accounts—which will be for the season during which the takeover was completed and therefore won’t include any of that NFT revenue—what their spending is like in the transfer market, whatever pronouncements the club chooses to make, idle gossip, and speculation.

It is the last of these which serves as the most powerful reminder as to why anything that may be interpreted as a lack of communication on important matters will ultimately do the owners of the club no good. Nature abhors an information vacuum, so every day of uncertainty will be filled with speculation, and even if supporter concerns at the condition of the club did turn out to be overblown, the image of the club isn’t being done any good at the moment.

We still know little about the outcome of the NFT sale, but let’s be generous and assume that was a roaring success for Crawley Town FC. What of the other claim, that the club would become “The Internet’s Team”? How’s that stacking up otherwise, fifteen months from when this particular hubris train rolled into town? Well, there is an unofficial supporters forum of the old school, but there doesn’t much seem to be much of an international crypto bro presence on there. Most of the comments on the club’s official Facebook page seem to be from normal supporters, too.

The WAGMI United social media machine has fallen somewhat quiet this year. The TikTok has less than 3,000 followers. The Instagram hasn’t been updated since the 2nd February, and the most liked comment under it reads: “Please get out of our club. You're ruining the one thing we love in Crawley. And here you are posting this shit instead of trying to help fix you're mess.” The Twitter account has tweeted once since the middle of April, and there’s no visible community on Reddit.

There is a Discord which does appear to be active, but the sum total of it all is that there doesn’t simply seem to be much interaction between the supporters and those who’ve come across the club as a result of all this. In other words—and I’m perfectly willing to be corrected on this, with supporting evidence—WAGMI United’s own social media presence has fallen off a cliff and there’s little obvious evidence that Crawley Town are anywhere close to becoming “The Internet’s Team”.

The prognosis for Crawley Town is just about anybody’s guess. This is a hardy club which has undergone numerous financial issues throughout its history, and it remains possible that they’ve already been put on a secure financial footing. And there’s little question that they’ve had it tough since they became involved. The John Yems racism situation blew up in their faces within days of them taking over the running of the club and they handled it about as well as could reasonably be expected.

But issues obviously remain. Going from a torrent of hubris to something resembling radio silence is no way to communicate with the club’s supporters, and it remains the case that the crypto/NFT markets look too volatile and risky to base the future financial well-being of this club upon. This is a club that needs evolution over revolution, which needs to be run as a community asset to be tended with care rather than treated as a petri dish for risky financial experiments.

And that, perhaps, is at the heart of the issues facing Crawley Town as the new season starts to come into view. WAGMI United remain ‘disruptors’, and the mantra of the disruptor remains to “move fast and break things”. The risk remains that the “thing” that ends up broken in this situation could be Crawley Town Football Club itself. Fifteen months after taking over the running of the club, these crypto bros still haven’t really proven that the club is fully safe in their hands.